Changing the Common Agricultural Policy would harm not just farmers but all of us, writes Seán Mac Connell
What do Irish Farmers' Association president John Dillon and French president Jacques Chirac have in common?
Both are convinced that any interference with the EU farm budget, which was agreed last year, is not on. Chirac told British prime minister Tony Blair last Friday that any attempt to cut farm spending was "unacceptable" - because an agriculture spending deal reached in 2002 was binding on all member states until 2013.
Dillon used exactly the same words when he spoke to the Joint Oireachtas Committee last week on farm-funding cuts being proposed.
While just about everyone outside agriculture likes to have a go at farmers, and believe they are a much cossetted species, the issue of fair play should also be considered.
We all know that thorny joke that Irish farmers do not fear bad weather. They fear only a postal strike because that could disrupt the arrival of the cheque in the post. Last year those cheques - distributed to the State's 135,000 farmers - accounted for 74 per cent of aggregate farm income.
While that may be astonishing to the rest of us, we have to realise that we all benefit from this money that was worth €1.64 billion last year.
The fact is that without these subsidies, Irish and a lot of European farming would collapse, and we would be left at the mercy of the ranchers of Europe and the rest of the world. Too often people fail to remember that the agri-food industry is Ireland's most important indigenous industry, with the sector as a whole accounting for 9 per cent of both gross domestic product and employment and over 8 per cent of exports.
Because of its indigenous nature and the fact we do not have to import many products, its contribution to the Irish economy is even greater. Its gross value added is estimated to be worth over €11 billion.
These facts are impressive. For instance, agri-food exports last year reached a record level of just over €7 billion, and this is expected to rise again this year, with dairy and beef export increases predicted.
As we become more urbanised, and perhaps inclined to forget we are only one step away from "the cow, calf and dunghill", we would do well to ponder those figures.
Over 112,000 people are employed in primary agriculture and a nearly half that number in the food, drinks and tobacco industry.
Agriculture is a cash-intensive business and the farmer is a big spender. In any provincial community it is money that has passed through the post-bag and the farmer's bank account that keeps many of the service industries going.
In many rural areas where farming is on the decline; where farmers exit milk production and switch to grazing sheep and cattle, the decline just does not stop at the farm gate. It blights the entire area. And in order to preserve the kind of rural landscape we have, we must also have people to manage it and farmers are currently doing that job.
For instance, Ireland's most unique landscape, the Burren in Co Clare, is in danger of being covered with useless scrub vegetation if the traditional farming practices, carried on there since before the time of Christ, do not continue.
There are those who will claim, not without justification, that farming has done more to damage the lakes and rivers here than any other sector, and there is truth in that.
While the industry denies this, there is undeniable evidence of nitrate and phosphate damage to ground-water and lakes and rivers.
But farmers can claim this was done not alone in ignorance but at the behest of Government, which demanded more production from the farmers in the 1970s and 1980s.
The EU money that drove that kind of environmentally insensitive development is now being diverted away from production, and farmers are being forced to farm in an environmentally sensitive way with the introduction of the nitrates directive later this year, which will limit fertiliser use and animal stocking rates on farms. On a voluntary basis, nearly 40,000 farmers have joined the Rural Environment Protection Scheme, which last year brought farmers just over €200 million.
Ireland was the first EU country to opt for a total break of the link between production and direct payments when the Cap was reviewed last year. Irish farmers were given assurances that for the next 10 years they would receive a single payment each year based on the average of the annual EU cheques they received in the three years, 2000-02. Many of them planned future activities on their farms based on these payments which were supposed to run to 2013.
To change the system now would cause real damage to the industry and to the economy as a whole and to every citizen of this State.